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Tech.Ed Day 2

So day 2 of Tech.Ed is actually turning out to be a bit better than day one in terms of interesting sessions. I've mainly been going to sessions on topics that I find personally interesting or useful and there are a few more of these today than yesterday.

One of the first was a Panel discussion on what they called "Web vNext". It's basically Microsoft's name for Web 2.0, and the host confessed that it's pretty much Microsoft policy not to use a name made popular by anyone else for a new technology. The whole thing was recorded and will be podcasted (or whatever Microsoft wants to call it) from the www.arcast.net site. This one was mainly interesting because the questions were largely asked by the audience (myself included - yes, I'm a huge nerd) and answered by two Microsoft employees and the founder of the Australian gnoos website, Ben Barren. It gave a a frank insight into how Microsoft sees this space and what they're doing about it. Some stuff looks pretty interesting, particularly the live.com and Atlas technologies.

The split session I just finished was an end-to-end development of a web site in ASP.NET 2.0, Atlas, Visual Studio 2005, and IIS 7.0. This was really cool. In about two and a half hours, he went from scratch to a data-driven website with templating and styles, role-based security and memberships, profiles and customization, and caching. In addition, the Atlas stuff provided legitimate AJAX support that was actually cross-browser (he used Firefox throughout rather than IE). It looks really good. I'll certainly be having a play with .NET 2.0 and VS 2005 when I get back to Brisbane. My machine needs a format anyway.

Anyway, that'll probably be it for me today. We've got the good old Tech.Ed party at a nightclub here on Darling Harbour. If it's anything like the one last year they'll be throwing drinks at us, so I think I'll make the most of that...